[linux-audio-user] cross platform FOSS audio software list

Tom Szilagyi tomszilagyi at gmail.com
Tue Jan 30 05:44:02 EST 2007


On 1/30/07, Chris Cannam <cannam at all-day-breakfast.com> wrote:
>
> Tom, can you point me to any documentation or examples for your
> flattened metadata format?  For a long time Rosegarden has supported
> flat text files as well as LRDF for plugin categorisation although not
> for any of the other metadata, and so far I've been using the same
> format for SV's Vamp feature extraction plugins -- but mine is not an
> especially good format and I wouldn't mind supporting another instead
> if it was simple to use without any additional libraries.

I came up with the following for utter simplicity on the host's side.
It is ugly and probably inefficient, but I couldn't allocate more than an
afternoon to do it, and I wanted to have some working stuff at the end.
Also, I only bothered to support metadata that my projects (Aqualung and
TAP-plugins) actually use, so this is probably incomplete as well.

In the directory Aqualung installs itself (%ProgramFiles%\Aqualung
by default), the following subtree is installed:

ladspa\dll\*.dll : plugin loadable modules
ladspa\meta\<UniqueID>\cat.txt : category specification for plugin
ladspa\meta\<UniqueID>\scale.txt : scale values for plugin

The scale.txt file is optional. It contains rows of the same format
(parseable with scanf()), containing space-separated fields:
<port> <value> <string>

The string extends to the end of the line, thus it may contain any
character (minus the newline). This is the text associated with <value>,
which is a float.

The worst aspect of this is probably that the plugins are not
installed system-wide; they are kept private to the particular host
(in this case, Aqualung).

> Also, how about a default LADSPA plugin path on Windows?  Audacity
> irritatingly likes to have them in %ProgramFiles%\Audacity\Plug-Ins,
> but a generic name like %ProgramFiles%\LADSPA Plugins (or Plug-Ins?)
> would seem more sensible.

It would be great to have a common ground so such programs could share
plugins. It's only a matter of standardization -- not to say that this is
something easy. :)

Tom



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